Round Films New-Up
The cover of Empire this month has a blurb paragraph where one of the entries reads "Meet the worst director in the world", and the one immediately afterwards reads "First look at Clerks II". Sidestepping any cheap jokes about whether those two articles might be related in some way, which I would never stoop to, I can exclusively confirm that the first tag does indeed apply to Uwe Boll's first UK interview, in which he comes off as less of a prick than usual but still dangerously deluded. Huge fun nonetheless, and the writer concludes by expressing my fear that one day he might make a half-decent film. And where would we be then?
It's a good time to be a Western fan right now, but - ssh! - you're not allowed to call Tommy Lee Jones's feature directing debut The Three Burials of Melquiadas Estrada a Western, apparently because Jones is tired of hearing the genre label used as a pejorative term. Seeing as I would never use the term "Western" as anything other than a compliment, I hope it's OK with him if I say Three Burials is a Western - it even has a scene where a man is lassooed! - and it's a pretty damn fine one at that. Jones is on peachy form as an actor and a director, creating a barbed political parable about the lonely death of a Mexican immigrant at the hands of a knucklehead border cop, and the cowboy who devises a cruel and brilliant plan to avenge the poor man's soul. It is blessed with another fragmented, literary and tragic script from Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) and Jones has an innate feel for the beauty and eerieness of the blasted Tex-Mex landscape - unsurprising, considering that most of the film was shot in and around the director's own ranch.
The Three Burials of Melquiadas Estrada is a handsome, angry and rewarding film that sadly lets itself down with a few moments of silliness. In the second half, the border police turn into the sort of bumbling cops who'd be at home in a remake of Last House on the Left, and there's one ridiculous scene in which we are apparently meant to assume Jones's character has just walked into a bar and said "Morning ladies. I somehow know you're both married, but me and my friend have just crossed the border. Mind going to a sleazy motel and fucking us both?" To which the women apparently reply "Hmm, sounds like a good idea." Later on, in a Crash-worthy coincidence, Jones meets one of the women again and doesn't mention their prior acquaintance at all. It's a moment that makes you wonder what the people behind the film were thinking.
Still, Jones just about gets away with it, which is more than you can say for Fatih Akin, following up his flawed but often remarkable debut Gegen die Wand with Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, a professional and well-made documentary that unfortunately fails to convince the viewer that Istanbul is the centre of any particularly remarkable musical scene. Eastern music is so often not for people like me, who have a hard time listening to "oversinging" - that sub-operatic pretension that infects genres from Bollywood soundtracks to modern R&B, leaving a trail of pained howling in its wake.
The city's buskers come across as being amiable sorts; wandering balladeers with a built-in philosophy about the potency of the streets and the communal city experience. The film unfortunately shares one of the most annoying tics of many recent music documentaries - a constant insistence that the music under examination is "political" without coming up with much evidence of this. The city's rappers are particularly prone to proclaiming their own massive originality and relevance, despite being a depressing carbon copy of the least imaginative aspects of the Western scene, rambling on and on about how they really are rather good at rapping and how they dislike other people who they consider to be less adept in this area.
The best rap critique I've seen this year comes in the third film I watched this weekend, as a nine-year-old kid who's already praised 50 Cent's moneymaking abilities thrashes away at a big-budget video-game called Kill Dat Nigga!, the finishing move to which involves putting a hand grenade in a rival crack dealer's mouth. That's Spike Lee there, expressing himself in a way that's witty, relevant, and so dead-on you want to cheer in the cinema.
Critics claim that his latest film, the quotable, lively and supremely confident crime thriller Inside Man, is an apolitical film. This is completely wrong, it's just that, after a career of battering the audience over the head with his Very Important Messages, Lee has suddenly turned around and made a film that could be said to have subtext - a film where political issues are put across within the fabric of the film, rather than halting the narrative stone dead to deliver an unconvincing sermon. And the revelations don't stop there - the film's treatment of Jews is balanced and even-handed, and whereas the women are leered at a bit, there's no suggestion that Lee would happily have all those Jezebel harlots strung up. He still does that rubbish-looking "man standing on a camera dolly" trick, but that's probably just his way of reminding us who's behind the camera.
Precisely why Lee has chosen to make this film is open to question, and perhaps he'll follow it up with more cinetrocities in the vein of The 25th Hour and She Hate Me. But for now, Spike Lee has made one of the most entertaining and consistent films of the year so far. I'm still scratching my head over it too.
It's a good time to be a Western fan right now, but - ssh! - you're not allowed to call Tommy Lee Jones's feature directing debut The Three Burials of Melquiadas Estrada a Western, apparently because Jones is tired of hearing the genre label used as a pejorative term. Seeing as I would never use the term "Western" as anything other than a compliment, I hope it's OK with him if I say Three Burials is a Western - it even has a scene where a man is lassooed! - and it's a pretty damn fine one at that. Jones is on peachy form as an actor and a director, creating a barbed political parable about the lonely death of a Mexican immigrant at the hands of a knucklehead border cop, and the cowboy who devises a cruel and brilliant plan to avenge the poor man's soul. It is blessed with another fragmented, literary and tragic script from Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) and Jones has an innate feel for the beauty and eerieness of the blasted Tex-Mex landscape - unsurprising, considering that most of the film was shot in and around the director's own ranch.
The Three Burials of Melquiadas Estrada is a handsome, angry and rewarding film that sadly lets itself down with a few moments of silliness. In the second half, the border police turn into the sort of bumbling cops who'd be at home in a remake of Last House on the Left, and there's one ridiculous scene in which we are apparently meant to assume Jones's character has just walked into a bar and said "Morning ladies. I somehow know you're both married, but me and my friend have just crossed the border. Mind going to a sleazy motel and fucking us both?" To which the women apparently reply "Hmm, sounds like a good idea." Later on, in a Crash-worthy coincidence, Jones meets one of the women again and doesn't mention their prior acquaintance at all. It's a moment that makes you wonder what the people behind the film were thinking.
Still, Jones just about gets away with it, which is more than you can say for Fatih Akin, following up his flawed but often remarkable debut Gegen die Wand with Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, a professional and well-made documentary that unfortunately fails to convince the viewer that Istanbul is the centre of any particularly remarkable musical scene. Eastern music is so often not for people like me, who have a hard time listening to "oversinging" - that sub-operatic pretension that infects genres from Bollywood soundtracks to modern R&B, leaving a trail of pained howling in its wake.
The city's buskers come across as being amiable sorts; wandering balladeers with a built-in philosophy about the potency of the streets and the communal city experience. The film unfortunately shares one of the most annoying tics of many recent music documentaries - a constant insistence that the music under examination is "political" without coming up with much evidence of this. The city's rappers are particularly prone to proclaiming their own massive originality and relevance, despite being a depressing carbon copy of the least imaginative aspects of the Western scene, rambling on and on about how they really are rather good at rapping and how they dislike other people who they consider to be less adept in this area.
The best rap critique I've seen this year comes in the third film I watched this weekend, as a nine-year-old kid who's already praised 50 Cent's moneymaking abilities thrashes away at a big-budget video-game called Kill Dat Nigga!, the finishing move to which involves putting a hand grenade in a rival crack dealer's mouth. That's Spike Lee there, expressing himself in a way that's witty, relevant, and so dead-on you want to cheer in the cinema.
Critics claim that his latest film, the quotable, lively and supremely confident crime thriller Inside Man, is an apolitical film. This is completely wrong, it's just that, after a career of battering the audience over the head with his Very Important Messages, Lee has suddenly turned around and made a film that could be said to have subtext - a film where political issues are put across within the fabric of the film, rather than halting the narrative stone dead to deliver an unconvincing sermon. And the revelations don't stop there - the film's treatment of Jews is balanced and even-handed, and whereas the women are leered at a bit, there's no suggestion that Lee would happily have all those Jezebel harlots strung up. He still does that rubbish-looking "man standing on a camera dolly" trick, but that's probably just his way of reminding us who's behind the camera.
Precisely why Lee has chosen to make this film is open to question, and perhaps he'll follow it up with more cinetrocities in the vein of The 25th Hour and She Hate Me. But for now, Spike Lee has made one of the most entertaining and consistent films of the year so far. I'm still scratching my head over it too.